From the first days in their Jewish day schools and youth organisations, young Jews are drilled with the lie that Palestine was ‘a land without people for a people without a land’. From its inception, the Zionist movement has sought to suppress Palestinian history and narratives. Whenever there are exhibitions or events or publications featuring Continue reading »
Religion and Faith
A Meditation for Those who are Grieving Loss during this Christmas Season, 2023 To write about grief at any time is difficult. To write about grief, as we migrate into the Christmas season, even more so. The character of Christmas as a season of enchantment, makes grief an ill fit. The character of Christmas as Continue reading »
Well, not so if they are Palestinian children that Israelis keep killing time and time again. It is part of what Israelis calls ‘mowing the grass’. I wrote the following nine years ago. At last counting there were 1,230 Palestinians killed in Gaza as a result of 3,000 or more air and artillery strikes. 56 Continue reading »
Theology has long been used to justify war. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it’s happening again in the Middle East. The defining difference between the warring parties in the Middle East is religion. Indeed, in many ways this is a depressingly old-fashioned conflict. So are its grizzly dynamics and rationales. Benjamin Netanyahu was clearly appealing to the highest Continue reading »
Overhead, suddenly, there was a noisy helicopter. I didn’t look up. Then I noticed that I hadn’t looked up. If I was in a place of terror from the sky, I would have looked up. The next day a friend and I went for a walk by the beach in Point Lonsdale. He is just Continue reading »
At the core of the cycle of violence in Israel and Palestine is “the studied blindness of two people to see the other, to accept that they have a legitimate place on the landscape”. Without such acceptance, this horrific war in Gaza will not be the last. We cannot know when and how the Israeli-Hamas Continue reading »
Hamas’s refusal to recognise Israel as a state is as absurd as Israel’s belief that the current massacre of Palestinians will destroy Hamas. If all this were mere stupidity it would be bad enough, but the consequent violence against innocent people is extreme and it is accelerating. The 1500 Israeli deaths and hundreds of kidnappings Continue reading »
Over the last few weeks we have been bombarded with a number of assertions, advanced firstly as mere mantra, but then appearing as axioms, or self-evident truths. Israel has a right to defend itself; and Israel has a right to exist. I wish to question whether these two statements are as axiomatic as our Prime Continue reading »
The UN is calling the Israel-Hamas war a ‘graveyard of children’…. an adult conflict, in which the young are suffering most. What we see on our TV screens every night is impossible to watch. Did Netanyahu see the young lad who had just carried the decapitated body of his friend from the rubble. If so, Continue reading »
The most pressing challenge for the Catholic Church remains addressing women’s inequality in its ranks. The current Synod on Synodality offers some hope, but there are huge roadblocks. The likelihood of equality for women in the Church requires a leap of faith, extremely long-term thinking, and hoping against hope. I cannot see it happening in Continue reading »